The mirror here is a metaphor for consciousness. We never see the narrator; we only hear his voice, as if he were looking at himself and living his life over again, moving ever further from the surface toward deeper layers of memory. Together, these layers make up his self, a self that no real mirror could ever reflect. The sense that these layers are authentic comes from the documentary nature of the fragments: newsreel footage; poems by the director’s father, the poet Arseny Tarkovsky, read in the poet’s own voice; the appearance of Andrei Tarkovsky’s mother on screen; the doubling of actors (the young mother and the wife are played by the same woman); real details of everyday life; and the coarse, close-up sound that accompanies the seemingly distant events of the inserted episodes.

We reach the root of the problem: the splitting of the family. The parents’ divorce is a trauma that deprives the child of wholeness, and the line “I just wanted to be happy” becomes an important metaphor for life’s troubles. The figures of the father and mother, in their inability to be together, reflect the narrator’s inability to achieve his own wholeness. To “mend” this rift, one must travel the path back, to the beginning, to the earthly paradise when the parents were still together. For Tarkovsky, the film becomes an act of returning to himself, an attempt to join the past and the present and to recover a lost sense of happiness. And that means creating a “work of art.” Creating Mirror.